Insight from a Doe
By Jennifer Ochstein
When she followed me along the trail, it felt like a conversion experience, a sign. My partner Sam and I were walking a stretch of urban trail on the University of Notre Dame campus, a broken asphalt path leading through a stand of walnut trees. Our dog Amos trotted at my side. We were discussing a conversion to Catholicism when we heard rustling behind us.
I thought someone was jogging up, so when I turned and saw a lone, young doe just 15 yards away, I was spellbound. Sam and I stared at her for a moment, thinking that at any minute she would spring back into the woods. We often spotted white-tailed deer, mostly camouflaged in underbrush further back in the copse of trees. None had ever been this bold or this close. As we moved forward, she followed. When we stopped, she stopped. When we walked, so did she.
We passed through the woods into a grassy meadow. The path ends at a private road into the campus and is flanked by a historic cemetery. Rather than continue into the road, I turned to face her, now only 10 yards behind us. Sam walked on with Amos. Thinking our dog was the problem, I stayed behind to discourage her from following.
Her ears and tail perked forward, but she didn’t chuff or charge. I stood alone with her, hidden from Sam’s view by bushes. We gazed steadily at one another. I thought to reach out but stopped myself, not wanting to ruin the moment. Her large brown eyes were unblinking as if she held unfathomable knowledge. She caught me, mesmerized, in her gaze. I stepped toward her, sure she would run. She didn’t. Her gaze never wavered. I was awestruck.
“Her large brown eyes were unblinking as if she held unfathomable knowledge. She caught me, mesmerized, in her gaze.”
Now, I think it was her fixed inspection that I found so unnerving. Was the experience a call from the spiritual world, a world beyond my reckoning, to something so other that it defies explanation? When I tried to explain the incident to others, I fumbled. Clearly, they said, she was simply tame and thought she might get food. But privately, I wondered what it could mean; the doe’s behavior reached beyond my ability to easily describe it. Something in her manner so captivated me that I couldn’t help but equate her to what many Christian devotees refer to as ‘love in the flesh.’
As I write this, I realize that I must seem like nothing more than a romantic city-dweller. I’m tempted to dismiss my perception of the unblinking gaze of the doe. Instead, I’m reminded of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ insight–that the doe that I witnessed possessed inescapable individuality on an extravagant earth, which abounds with individual “selves.” For a moment, I saw that she was wholly herself. Hopkins, who lived during the mid-1800s, said: “What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.” Indeed. I caught a glimpse of that reality.
When I think of it now, I see that I was converted, just not in the way I thought. I realized that in looking for a conversion to Catholicism in the unblinking gaze of a doe, I dismissed the real beauty staring me in the face. She was simply herself, a doe in the woods. I was transformed by her doe eyes, a force beyond my control, a force I could barely understand, of thirst and hunger, of birth and death. Rather than become Catholic, I was converted to life itself and the power of nature, committed to seeing the reality of the doe’s life and lives like hers beyond the reaches of the manufactured landscapes in which I live.
I see now that my conversion in that moment was one of extraordinary empathy for the natural world. It’s easy to love God, I think. Especially because we can make an invisible God into whatever we want. It’s harder to love humans and particularly wild animals—to take joy in them, to be fully present. These creatures live so closely beside us and too often go unnoticed—or, worse, are noticed and destroyed when they’re in our way. This realization of our connection to them is the benediction, a source of awe.
Jennifer Ochstein writes essays, plays with poetry, teaches, and has been shaped by the wide open spaces and flat lands of the Midwest. She’s published work in Sojourners, Under the Gum Tree, America Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, Lindenwood Review, The Cresset, Connotation Press and more.
